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[Shooer]

Actually lasers do a VERY sharp spear, at around 10 damage the profile goes from a single line to a wider line.  I've one shot ships with a 40+ damage laser before, and captured another that survived a shot and that's when I learned that my laser wasn't doing a single line of damage anymore.

Particle beams do a much shallower version of the same spear.

Missiles do a perfect pyramid, so every square is a new layer. 

Also microwave guns do triple damage to shields and then ignore armor like mesons, but unlike mesons they only damage electronics.  Microwaves can easily blind ships and render them defenseless but intact.

Also Gauss don't need power plants, while the rest all need power supplied as good as their capacitor rating.


Biology unlocks genetic engineering, which lets you turn a population of one race into a modified version.  You research the steps similar to other things.  Honestly it's not that great for anything other than RP to me, because the cost/time investment in making a race that can survive way outside your own races norms is way to much compared to making a transformer fleet.

Edit: Also the reason your ground survey team isn't doing anything is because you need to use a geo-survey ship first.

[Flying Dice]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I just usually don't get to the point where that starts happening, because conventional start + slowdown. Also forgot about microwaves, hah. Also CIWS, which are basically self-contained gauss PD units that can be mounted on commercial vessels.

[Metalax]

As an addendum to flying dice's point about beam weapon ranges, while you will never get to use the full listed range on higher tier lasers, it does extend the damage drop off so that you will be hitting harder at the usable maximum range determined by your fire-controls.

The main useful purpose for the gene-engineering, outside of RP purposes, is for colonizing bodies that lie outside of your races gravity tolerance range. Occasionally also useful for worlds that no amount of terraforming will get to be habitable by your base race, but can be moved close enough that gene-modding can cover the gap.

One thing to note with gene-modding, you can only use a base race to design new ones. You can't do an iterative process of using a modded race as the basis for another modded race.

[Bremen]

Railguns do have a damage falloff, though it doesn't really make sense that they do.

Particle cannons, unless things have changed, do not have very long ranges because they don't gain a range bonus from weapon size. So they're shorter range than most large lasers or railguns (though longer range than smaller weapons), and usually less than your max fire control range at any given tech level. Their big advantage is no damage falloff, which means they can hit very hard even where lasers or railguns would be doing 1 or 2 damage hits. The end result is a weapon that is weaker than lasers or railguns at close range, can't hit at very long range, but has a sweet spot at medium to long range where it's extremely lethal.

[Lord Shonus]

Is there any way to use SM to boost NPR tech levels? The last three NPRs I destroyed were literally helpless because my standard shipkillers (size 5 with a warhead of 9 and size 10 with a warhead of 25) have speeds of 22400, while their counter-missiles only could manage between 8000 and 8800, barely faster than some of my light warships (My LACs are around 7700, and I've been toying with 3000 ton spinal frigates that can hit 7000). My heavy cruisers could vaporize any of their ships, regardless of tonnage, with a single salve (except for a few of the beam ships that did exceptionally well with beam PD) with a single salvo (of 8 (half-size launcher) 10s and 4 (full size) 5s), while my light cruisers (12 full-size size 5 tubes) could handle pretty much anything as well. The only ship I've lost was a collier that they decided to sandpaper instead of attacking my ships and caught a round in a magazine.

[Flying Dice]

Particle cannons, unless things have changed, do not have very long ranges because they don't gain a range bonus from weapon size.

For all intents and purposes they do, because one of their tech lines is for range increases (the other being for damage). My Aurora is crashing on startup right now so I can't check, but IIRC it doesn't take long until their nominal range is >1m km.

[Bremen]

Particle cannons, unless things have changed, do not have very long ranges because they don't gain a range bonus from weapon size.

For all intents and purposes they do, because one of their tech lines is for range increases (the other being for damage). My Aurora is crashing on startup right now so I can't check, but IIRC it doesn't take long until their nominal range is >1m km.

The Particle Beam 1m km tech is a million research points and is the second to last range tech, so good luck getting that in a normal game. Compared to the fire control range tech at 1m RP, which gives 150,000 km base range. 4x size and 2x that for max range means 1.2m km range for lasers and railguns at that tech level.

A more reasonable level for a normal game, say 30,000 RP, give 320 kkm particle beams and 384 kkm fire controls. Like I said, particle beams consistently lag behind the range of your fire control (and thus large aperture lasers and railguns, which tend to have massive ranges in the millions of km but are limited by your fire control).

Compare this to say, lasers. Lasers get a maximum range tech path, but they also get a range multiplier based on size. So even though the techs for laser range have smaller numbers than the techs for particle beam range, in practice the range of a large laser will be massively higher (though it will be limited by your fire control).

For example, using the same tech level for everything:

30cm Soft X-ray laser: Maximum range 1.44m km
Strength 9 Particle Beam range 320,000: Maximum range .32m km
Beam Fire Control S02 192-6250: Maximum range .384m km

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, you're right -- I didn't have the numbers in front of me, and I remembered incorrectly.

[kholdstayr]

Is there a detailed guide to technologies and descriptions of them? I see a list here: http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=List_of_Research_Costs but that doesn't really describe anything.

[Flying Dice]

Nothing that I'm aware of beyond the in-game descriptions. Once again, though, a great many of the techs are pretty self-explanatory. The various production rates are [tech value, e.g. mining production 16] per facility per annum. So using that tech example, Mining Production 16 means that each mine you have will produce 16 tons of minerals each year. Construction Rate 25 means that each construction factory will complete 25 BP worth of installations each year. Terraforming Rate 0.0025 means that each terraforming installation/module will add or remove 0.0025 atms of gas from a planet's atmosphere each year. The military tech is mostly self-explanatory as well, especially if you check the module research window to see how the different techs affect ship components; by and large it's just "higher tech = more" of whatever the tech does, be it reduction in fuel use, decrease in drive thermal signature, weapon range, weapon damage, sensor range etc.

[Sheb]

So using that tech example, Mining Production 16 means that each mine you have will produce 16 tons*accessibility of each minerals each year.

FTFY.

[Shooer]

There are few unlocks and weird ones.  Like the launcher size reduction tech leads to box launchers (small but can only be reloaded in a hanger or at a planet with enough maint-facilitys), the different ground forces lead into different ones (basically you got ones that are good at defense, offence, or both then the heavier versions that are just stronger), and the progression for engines and reactors goes engine->reactor->engine->reactor for the most part.

[Sheb]

Should be noted that Marines gets a *2 bonus when fighting on ships or PDCs.

[Flying Dice]

One of the more important ones to note is that armor tech works by reducing the tonnage per layer, and that different levels of armor tech use different minerals in the production process.

So using that tech example, Mining Production 16 means that each mine you have will produce 16 tons*accessibility of each minerals each year.

FTFY.

Yeah, I didn't get into that because it's more related to the production process than the flat value of the tech, for the same reason that I didn't mention that a construction factory at a given tech level would produce different percentages of different installations because they don't all require the same amount of BP to complete, or that I didn't mention that administrator/captain skills can affect production rates for their commands, because those are all modifiers to the base value provided by the tech.

[Sheb]

Yeah, I know, but the mineral system is one of those things where it's not evident, so I'd rather point it out.